Isay Weinfeld is an award winning Brazilian architect with over 30 years of architectural experience designing civic spaces, residential homes, commercial buildings, hotels and restaurants in Brazil and worldwide. This collection of architectural drawings for the Livraria da Vila bookshop in Sao Paulo is a good example of the architectural design process, showing both rough perspective plans as well as more highly finished interior schemes.

The architectural drawings were created for the Livraria da Vila bookshop in the prestigious Jardim Paulista area of Sao Paulo. As a result of the widely acclaimed structure, Weinfeld was commissioned to design two subsequent Livraria da Vila branches located around Brazil. Weinfeld’s design brief was to create a space that reflected the client’s belief that bookstores should be cultural hubs as well as places of commerce. To achieve this, Weinfeld incorporated into his scheme a small lecture auditorium, a café and a storytelling area for children.

One of the striking elements of the Livraria da Vila’s design is the pivoting glass-fronted, steel framed doors lined with books that form the entrance to the bookshop during opening hours. Weinfeld’s inspiration for this design element is said to be les bouquinistes, the Parisian second-hand booksellers that line the banks of the river Seine selling books beneath their green wooden awning boxes.

This design drawing depicts the partly realised ground floor interior scheme for the Livraria da Vila. Although the majority of this scheme was realised, the back wall, rendered here as a green open space with planted shrubbery, was replaced at a later stage with floor to ceiling bookshelves.

These drawings are particularly significant to the Collection as they mark the V&A’s first acquisition of a South American architect's work.